Uncharted 3 Includes Hotline to Facebook, YouTube

You’ve just fired up Uncharted 3 for the first time, but instead of flashing crazy-cool loading screens, say of Arabian sandscapes or character glamor shots, you’re watching a live feed of your Facebook friends connected to the PlayStation Network and playing the game.

Sure, other games let you deliver missives to your Facebook profile (Uncharted 2 already lets you dispatch achievements to Twitter) but Uncharted 3 looks to blur the line between gaming and social networking entirely: Instead of dropping out of the game to view videos or scan Facebook friend updates, you’ll be able to do so from within Uncharted 3 itself.

“I don’t think anyone else has gone to that level to bring Facebook within the game. People usually do it the other way around,” Naughty Dog co-president Christophe Balestra told USA Today. “We are the first ones who are doing this.”

Make that the first to let you chat directly with Facebook friends and “invite them to your party.” Balestra adds that interaction through Facebook–say “liking” someone’s Uncharted 3 posts–could lead to the game issuing an in-game gift, too.

What’s more, you’ll be able to post video clips of up to 90 seconds, dub your own voiceovers, manipulate the camera in scene, even share your videos with friends and offer them editing control, extending the directorial experience. And when you’re finished, you can upload the videos direct to YouTube. Naughty Dog says it plans to select the best videos to play on something it’s called “Uncharted TV,” a picture-in-picture feed that plays in the game pre-launch menu.

In other words, expect to find tons of Uncharted 3 videos clogging up YouTube in November when the game arrives. The upload direct option, the 90 second video play limit, and the game’s assured high sales all but guarantee a user-content deluge.